Category Archives: Personal Stories

For several years now, part of my 7-year-old son’s bedtime ritual has been to mark off the day on a calendar that he keeps in the room. The calendar lists many holidays and he often will ask my wife and me to explain what they are. I am writing this post on September 12, 2011 and last night he asked us to explain what "Patriot Day" was.

My wife and I had both paid attention to our share of remembrances, but we hadn’t openly discussed the anniversary around our son. We also hadn’t had the TV or commercial radio on all day (which is actually pretty normal for a weekend day), so he hadn’t heard or seen any of the coverage either. The events of September 11, 2001 aren’t currently covered in school for his age group and we hadn’t had previous occasion to discuss them with him, so this was the first time we needed to address the issue.

I know that we probably could have largely avoided the issue by giving a simplistic answer, such as "It is a day where we recognize American heroes" or something similar to that. That type of evasive answer somehow felt dishonest, though, so we instead did our best to provide a child-friendly explanation of events that still feel almost entirely inexplicable even to my grown-up mind. During the conversation, he frequently asked us variations on the question "why?" We did our best to explain that there really isn’t a good answer to that question.

We weren’t blindsided by the need to address the issue. It was obviously a possibility that he would see or here some reference to 9/11 around the 10th anniversary and ask us about it. In fact, it wasn’t really a surprise that his calendar commemorated the day and that was what triggered the question. For that reason, my wife and I did already have ideas in mind for how to address the subject, although it wasn’t easy to actually express the right words when the time actually came.

We started off by first asking him if he had heard anything about the events, either at school, from friends, or from some other source. When he said he hadn’t, we then explained that some very bad people had attacked buildings in New York City and Washington D.C., causing many people to get killed. One thing we avoided was telling him the specifics of how the attacks were carried out, mainly because we do fly somewhat frequently and we feared that part of it would be too much for him to handle. I’m sure we would have answered direct questions, but he didn’t ask for more details of that type.

We tried to focus on the heroism of the firefighters, police officers, and even civilian bystanders that risked and, in too many cases, lost their lives trying to help get people to safety. He specifically asked us where they took the people that they rescued and we told him that those who were injured were taken to hospitals, some were simply moved out of harm’s way, and that some of those rescued joined the effort to rescue others. We tried really hard to convey that the attacks themselves represented the worst of what people can do, but that much of the immediate response brought out some of the very best of humanity and that those heroes are the focus of the recognition of the anniversary.

As I mentioned when I started this series of posts, my son turned 6 last week. After the fairly big and elaborate celebration of last year, we decided to keep everything very low key this year. We even decided to limit the birthday celebrations to just the immediate family, although that really had more to do with logistics and scheduling than anything else.

As our son’s main birthday treat, we decided to make a trip down to Disneyland on the Saturday before. We have an ownership interest in the Disney’s Vacation Club timeshare and looked into the possibility of getting a reservation at the recently opened Villas at the Grand Californian, but there wasn’t any availability that night so we decided to simply make it a day trip.

We live only about an hour away from Disneyland and have passes for admission, so we do make reasonably frequent visits down there, although not nearly as often as my wife and I did when we were younger and childless. Our last visit had been only about a month before, but was primarily for the celebration of an adult friend’s birthday. Since that day had a bit more of a scheduled agenda, we decided to make this visit an “Andy’s choice” day, where he would pretty much get his pick of rides and activities. For this reason, we also chose not to try and meet up with any other friends, but instead just make it a family day.

One special activity we included that day was lunch at Goofy’s Kitchen, the character dining location at the Disneyland Hotel. Andy is still a huge fan of the Disney characters and gets a bit kick out of these meals where some of his favorites come around and visit the table. During our meal, we had visits with Goofy, Chip & Dale, Mulan, Jasmine, Baloo (from The Jungle Book) and Brer Fox. We also got to visit with Pluto for a couple photos before we went to our table.

The restaurant also has occasional kid participation activities and Andy had the chance to get up and do The Twist with the characters as well as to help Goofy with baking of a cake (which mostly involved kids playing noisemakers and pretending to help clean up).

Toward the end of our visit to the restaurant, the waiter brought Andy a cupcake with a birthday candle on it and Chip plus a few of the restaurant staff members all gathered for a short birthday celebration. It wasn’t anything overly fancy, but Andy definitely got a big kick out of it.

After lunch, we headed back into the park to visit attractions. This included a visit to see Mickey Mouse at his house in Toontown, where everyone did give Andy a bit of extra attention for his birthday. The birthday visit was during the first weekend that Disneyland had all of their Christmas activities up and running, so we took that opportunity to see the Christmas parade and fireworks show. Overall, it was a fun day and Andy seemed to really enjoy himself.

For the evening of Andy’s actual birthday, he picked pork chops and mashed potatoes for his birthday dinner, a bit of a surprise since we had never really thought that pork chops was one of his favorites. We then had the traditional ice cream cake for dessert and then let him open presents.

While he got a lot of really nice gifts, it was kind of funny that possibly the biggest hit of the bunch was the birthday card that I had picked up for him the night before. The card is the type that has a chip in it that plays sounds when the card is opened. It features the characters from the Disney/Pixar movie Cars and plays the song “Life is a Highway” from the movie, which has been Andy’s favorite song for quite a while. Even though my wife had already bought another card for him, I couldn’t resist buying this one when I spotted it while shopping for a couple other items at the local Walgreens store the night before.

The main gifts this year included a couple Thomas the Tank Engine toys from my wife and me and a shirt and Mickey Mouse wristwatch from one of his sets of grandparents. The watch was a pretty exciting gift for him as it is his first and he was pretty proud about getting a big kid’s gift like that.

Andy’s other set of grandparents were a bit late in shipping out his gift from them (a Mr. Potato Head and full set of parts), so he had a little extra gift opening event later in the week. That turned out to be a bit of a nice opportunity to prolong his birthday celebration a bit longer.

There was also a little celebration of his birthday in his class at school, but I don’t have any photos as neither my wife nor I were there for it. My wife brought along a couple packages of mini-cupcakes that were distributed around to the class and the teacher gave him a small gift as well.

While this was probably a much more low key birthday than many of his past ones (particularly the year before), it still was a fun time. Happy birthday, Andy!

By Andy’s 5th birthday, he had completed his first full year of pre-school, as well as a couple years in a weekly Gymboree program. Between the two, he had made a lot of friends and had also had the opportunity to attend quite a few of his friends’ birthday parties. This led us to think that it was a good idea to celebrate his 5th birthday (something of a milestone) with his first real birthday party with other kids.

We live in a townhouse that doesn’t have a yard or an overall design that would really be suited to having a large group of kids over. While there is a party room available for rent in our condominium complex, it isn’t really overly kid-friendly either. We realized that we really needed to find a kid-appropriate venue for the party.

Our first thought (and Andy’s first suggestion) was Farrell’s, having spent his birthday there the two previous years. We looked into it and found that the price wasn’t too out of line, but we had major reservations about whether or not it would really work all that well for a big group of pre-school aged kids. Other than the little merry-go-round, Mountasia really doesn’t offer much for kids that age and we were picturing a party that was little more than the kids all sitting around a big table eating ice cream and pizza.

Andy was still kind of pushing for having the party there, but we were able to placate him by promising a family visit there not too long after his birthday. We ended up going up there the weekend after his birthday for dinner and ice cream, inviting a few of our adult friends to meet up with us there as well. Of course, Andy again got in a bunch of rides on the little merry-go-round.

Having recently been to another kid’s birthday party that was held at a local play gym, we realized that it would be vastly preferable to go somewhere that the kids could run around and play. As I mentioned, we had been taking Andy to classes at a local Gymboree Play & Music location since he was really young.

We checked into it and found that their prices for birthday parties were within our budget and that they had availability on Andy’s actual birthday (which was on a Sunday that year). During his weekly class, we mentioned that we were considering having his birthday party there to his teacher, who is an outstanding teacher that Andy, and we, adored. The teacher responded by offering to host and run the party if we booked it, which pretty much instantly sealed the deal for us.

Continuing my look back at my son’s previous birthdays in celebration of him turning 6 this week, here are my memories of his 4th birthday. As he has gotten older, I have found that I had a tendency to take more photos, so the remaining posts will cover just one year at a time.

Age 4 (2007)

Andy’s 3rd birthday was the first that he still remembered pretty well a year later. Because of that, he decided that he wanted to do pretty much the same thing as the year before, returning once again to Farrell’s. This time, we decided to forgo the formal birthday package and instead just let everyone order whatever they wanted off of the menu.

As with the previous year’s visit, we included some play time in the game area at Mountasia. Once again, Andy used the majority of the game/ride credits that we got for him to ride on the little merry-go-round. During this visit, he did also give skee-ball a try for the first time, although I really was doing most of the work.

A couple months before his 4th birthday, Andy started his first year of pre-school. For birthday kids, the teacher had a short celebration where the child was given a birthday crown and allowed to put candles onto a felt birthday cake.

Finally, we did also do the now-traditional cake and gift-opening at home on his actual birthday. Once again, the cake was an ice cream cake.

He had received most of his major gifts during the party at Farrell’s, but we gave him a toy fire truck that I had found at a really good sale price between the two parties and he also had gifts from his grandparents to open.

Today is my son’s 6th birthday! As a celebration of that big event, I thought I’d share some memories of his past birthday celebrations in posts over the next few days.

Age 1 (2004)

To celebrate his first birthday, we attended the Disneyland Birthday Celebration that they offer a couple times a day at the Plaza Inn restaurant on Main Street. At this event, everyone gets an undecorated cupcake along with small cups containing frosting and sprinkles to use to decorate them. A character named Pat E. Cake hosts the event and Mickey and Minnie Mouse also pay a visit. Quite a few of our friends were able to join us at the park for the party as well.

The first birthday also started our now usual tradition of going out somewhere for a bigger party, but also having a little family-only party at home with cake and the opening of his presents from us and various relatives.

This was also the one time that we attempted to make his birthday cake instead of buying one from the store, but we found that we generally lacked much cake decorating talent.